Rock is Real; the indomitable solutions of daydream improvisation and hulking pure energy, or, How I learned to quit being a pussy and dig the sounds of the Chargers Street Gang and Lucid Nation

by Kurt Hernon

"Too much of a good thing can be bad." It’s one of those sickening clichés that has been blabbered a million times by thousands of voices and yet it still crawls under the skin and infuriates. A line like that just pisses all over you. So why doesn’t it do its dirty work when Tamra Spivey spits it out like mouthful of so much bloody saliva? Why can Spivey take a cliché as pathetic as that one and let it drip from her bottom lip, yellow red spittle and blood, all venom, but still salve for a wound? Is it not, after all, the most pathetic cliché? Certainly there are many, many others that are woefully bad, but clearly "Too much of a good thing can be bad" is unimpeachable in all of its crowning glory as cliché of clichés. So how can Spivey use such words that mean NOTHING at all, useless words that have been strung together in vain attempts to set order in an anti-intellectual world, and make them sound…uh…viable (er, valuable?)? Clichés are cliché for a reason, and generally those reasons aren’t very flattering. They are the distillation of ignorance. They even sound ignorant if you sit back and repeat them to yourself time and again. And for argument’s sake, I take a lot of heat for using a word like this, but cliché’s a far, far more ignorant than a little word like, oh, say, fuck. FUCK: ‘Tis just a mere word, without any pretense, no implications, no lessons, no assumptions about anything at all. Just a word. ONLY a little fucking word. Words don’t kill…people kill for the free use of words. Therefore, thus, and as it were, "Too much of a good thing" is the absolute worst, king-hell sort of abhorrent cliché - one that imposes its simplistic (ignorant) morality on you. The line portends a dopey life lesson and masquerades as wisdom. Who’s fucking wisdom? Not mine, not yours, and certainly not Tamra Spivey’s. In fact Spivey gnaws at the phrase like she’s damn sick and tired of the pointless use of words in our world today– or the frightening idea that such phrases hold any weight at all…with anyone. On "Where There’s a Will There’s a Way", the first song on another free-form improv-ed Lucid Nation disc that happened into my dirty hands a few days back, Spivey ferrets out the bullshit that prances around pretending to have meaning in life and batters it down with such viciousness, such a smiling ferocity, that she may be trying to rid the world of cliché forever.

In fact Spivey, never one to shy away from the idea that rock and roll should still not only have no boundaries but should actively push and stretch and tear and bludgeon any parameters placed upon it (if you can get yer hands on ‘er, last years "live" at KXLU boot was a warping of this sensibility – to the glorious extreme), whether formally or informally, uses every precious second of "Where There’s a Will" to dole out boring cliché after boring cliché with a bunch of giggling madness that really just laughs at whoever it is that might respect or find some "real" meaning in such shit these days. In fact this whole disc is a sort of think-for-yourself punk implosion, or, hell, better to just call it sensible, realist rock. Because Spivey knows that using your own fucking mind as you see fit is far more horrifying to those who count on the people’s placidity than any impish punk airs that one could ever put on.

"I can just look at a puppy and be sad / that’s / how / fucked / I am" Spivey drolly wanks during "Sweet Misery" (fuck that song title, this thing should be called "Ha, ha, and fucking HA!" – a little improvisational titling work fits the bill here). Tam quickly answers the line herself, as if impressed, with a faux, "Really?" It’s a completely dead on snap, it’s sharp, it’s funny as shit masturbatory art at its honed finest, and it is as perfect a real rock moment as you’ll find on any rockroll disc here on God’s green Earth right now. In fact this whole Lucid thing, this disc, the last disc, all of Lucid Nation’s fucking discs and music are, at the core, exactly that – unrepentant intellectual masturbation. What fine art isn’t? Spivey and her assorted cohorts, band mates, muses, contemporaries, and hangers ons (which I proudly proclaim myself one of) let it all out for everyone to feel, to hear, and to get OFF on. Lucid Nation’s work has been steadily creeping toward this sort of heady freak-out voyeurism since they started at whatever they call this, and here, it sound like they have finally achieved a bit of it. With this new batch of "tunes" (loosely played, hardly pulled together, but wildly song-like) Spivey and her Nation titillates with its sheer matter-a-factness – this isn’t the kind of shit you play if you expect to be sleeping on a pillow stuffed with dollars someday. But it is the kind of shit you play and play LOUD AS SHIT when you’ve just hooked up with a real FREAK of a girl (or, okay, to gain some measure of your fucked political correctness – GUY) at some rockroll club and you’ve slithered back to your place to count her tattoos and finger her piercings for awhile. Slap this on and a freak will go all the way to Freak City on you – truuuust me on this one. Just trust. After all, ain’t sex ultimately what’s at the sweet sugary core of this rockroll gig? This is sex people – music as rough, exhausting, invigorating physical and cerebral pleasure. Or, just some racket to get your rocks off too, whichever way you like it.

Now I don’t know if that’s insulting to a musician or not – the analogous sex talk - I ain’t never been one, don’t intend on ever being one, and honestly could probably care less. It’s just that the music gets me off, me, me, me - so of course I go back around to sex for the answers. Is that such a crime? Shit, I’d much rather turn to sex than to politics, politicians, priests, rabbis, and clerics, or such other conventional nonsense. Give me something I can feel, give me the blistering, smoldering, sweat-soaked squeals that Spivey gyrates to on "Favorite Star" every fucking time. She may be doing a one-up on the very groovy James Gang swagger, but hey a song like that, just like the James Gang’s shit has always done before it, can make a man…well you get it by now.

So Tam Spivey’s tunes have a way about them that makes gets me going, okay I can gladly deal with that. But the other real fucking rockroll revelation of the moment comes from an entirely different place, both literally and figuratively, and it doesn’t do anything close to what Lucid Nation does o me.

The Chargers Street Gang are hometown Midwestern boys from Cleveland, Ohio who have apparently buried their fangs in the neck of Cleveland’s underground rock corpse and found a bloody fountain of youth. Holy the Bop Apocalypse, the bands new debut record on Get Hip records, is a staggeringly frenzied slab of music that can only be called a psychotic reaction to this fucking town where they and I live. And while the songs are filled with some of the most LOUD, and INsane, and GOrgeous rockroll racket I’ve heard in a long, long, long (that’s a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO - OOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNG) time, it’s the two "tem’s" that gets my blood boiling – the tempo and the temper. Tempo in that, from the killer hand-claps that set the fuse on "Tom Waits for No One" to the guitar meltdown on "Shitty Song", these guys not only display no desire to slow down, they honestly just can’t! Their music and muse just won’t allow them. They may want to, they may have tried, but uh-uh, no fucking way this train is a slowin’. Which is manifest in the temper of all things Bop – these guys are ripping and roaring, but they ain’t all that happy about the deal, for make no bones about it this is blues based music.

"What the fuck are you talking about man? You’re a goddamn nitwit, this shit is a whole bunch of things, does a whole bunch of other things, but it ain’t the motherfuckin’ blues!"

Blues is what I’m saying, and it is what I mean, I’ve got my guns and I’m sticking to ‘em. These cats, the Chargers Street Gang, are singin’ something that I may need to explain to ya’ll. It’s a rare and unbelievable form o’ music called the impatient white boy blues. Yep, that’s what we have here, and it just may be the definitive recording of ‘em in our times. It’s fantastic shit. Hey, easy now rascal, just cuz these cats whiz and scream through ‘em don’t mean they are anything else but pained. These are the fucking blues man, listen to them will ya?

Sure, I ain’t trying to roll out wrong impressions, these are NOT the bump-a-dump-a-rump blues from Chicago. Nor are they remotely trad in any way. They are actually more like the Stooges doing a rendition of Exile on Main Street. But those are the blues too (go ahead, argue with me on that one…I’ll bop you on the nose) and the Charger SG have every right, every need, to plow their blues out fast and furious like because white kids from the suburbs-to-semi suburbs ain’t supposed to have the blues. You might get yer ass kicked, or worse, have the folks toss you on Ritalin or in some juvey joint if you ever fess up to being uncertain, or down on things. Hell, you got it ALL man, ma and pa have seen to that.

So you ain’t supposed to have any pain, or angst. You can’t experience hardships. That just ain’t what being white, male, and American is all about! But guess the fuck what? Joe Holzheimer has ‘em. Lachllan Mackinnon has ‘em too. So do Chris Kulcsar and Matt Fish. Hell, even Chris Rood, beating out a groove on his bass guitar feels the fucking pain man. Don’t buy it do you? Well I do. I’ve lived it. And these guys, the Chargers Street Gang, sing ‘em as well as anyone when they finally shed the teardrop that contains "Amazing Disgrace", Holy’s most obvious tender and revealing moment (but believe me, it isn’t sensitive to the fact). Sung with eyes turned away, "Disgrace" wails lonely, painfully, and earnestly before it finally runs away and hides behind it’s closing feedback and the step-two of "Raised on Richards", and along with it the white boy impatient blues sneak away and put on their brilliant disguise once again.

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